I just write in the way that I write.' She added that with the great writers whom she admires – notably Don DeLillo, to whom Tóibin compared her in Edinburgh – she felt a connection that was beyond gender.

I don't have any outside view of myself and if I did I would probably be creatively inhibited. But I don't think of myself as a macho writer. She added: 'Someone had described as being macho. 'My dad had a Vincent Black Shadow, which was a quite particular thing: it was the fastest cycle of its era … It sparked a world for me when I was old enough I got a motorcycle.' The novel, in Kushner's words, 'combines 1970s radical politics in Italy with the art world in New York and motorcycle racing in the American west'. The novel's narrator, nicknamed Reno, is using her bike to become a land artist – racing through a dried-up lake bed in Utah and photographing the tracks as a vast sculpture. 'Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones,' she said. The 44-year-old lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles (she began writing the book in the month her boy was born), and grew up in Oregon, the child of bohemian-academic parents. The Flamethrowers is Kushner's second novel. But to me it's not male material, or rather if it is male material I guess there's part of me that's male, because I wrote the book that was in me and was natural for me to write.' 'That preoccupation is not my battle … However, some of the debate has centred around this idea that I use male material. 'Writer rolls her eyes,' said Kushner in response to a question about the debate. Tóibin, chairing an event with the writer at the Edinburgh international book festival, put it more humorously: it was as if Kushner was announcing that 'if anyone thinks there is a 'male novel', and anyone thinks that women should write a different kind of novel, I've just arrived on a motorbike covered in leather and I am ready to eat you all'.

In Salon she was dubbed the novelist 'who scares male critics … When Rachel Kushner – not a venerable male auteur – writes the Great American Novel, male reviewers are flummoxed'. Novelist Jonathan Franzen has called her 'a thrilling and prodigious novelist'.Įlsewhere, though, the novel has prompted accusations that its so-called 'macho' qualities (there is a great deal of speed, risk and bodily excitement) explain 'why it has been received so enthusiastically by the critics'. Perhaps the most important American literary taste-maker, James Wood, gave it a lengthy rave review in the New Yorker, calling it 'scintillatingly alive … It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures'.

The flamethrowers novel